Ethiopia: Famine, War, and Environmental Destruction - Is Nature to Blame?
(By Seyoum Hameso, PhD.^*)

This brief article will analyze whether all the gloom and doom is imposed by nature alone or if the hands of people gave added impetus for destruction.  The working assumption here is that while it is easy to blame nature, the problem at hand is as much man-made.

It should be clear from the outset that drought and other natural calamities do strike any part of the world.  It is the policy of the governments that lessen their impacts. Drought does not translate itself directly to famine if the people have enough reserves, and if distribution of resources including food materials is fair.  But that is not the case with the consecutive Ethiopian regimes who care for their maintenance of power than for people.

This article will argue that these regimes brought famine conditions to the population groups.  For example, Menelik was preoccupied with his expansionary war to the south when a Great Famine struck in 1896.  According to imperial chronicles, the situation was so bad that, in those days, some form of cannibalism was practiced.  Haile Selassie had a badly reported fight in his hands with Ogaden and Eritrea when nearly a million people perished in 1973/74.  The regime that was supported by the West did crumble by the combination of Western camera exposure and overbearing local dissent.  The places that famine struck hard, including Wollo and Tigray were not the regime’s favorite areas, as they were complicated by traditional feudal power rivalries.  Unhealthy distribution of resources, mainly land and destructive exploitation of nature and people led to a situation where peasant farmers were in no position to resist any drought condition.  In other words, they lost their resilience to natural hazards.  War worked to complicate matters.  Traditionally northern warlords of Ethiopia thrived in the business if war and banditry which is only ‘modernised’ by imperial centralization.  Here as elsewhere the first victims of banditry are peasants.  So they were in 1973.

In 1984, the world media was again preoccupied with another round of gloom.  Famine was back again.  The military regime of Mengistu Hailemariam had one vision: build a "communist" empire.  Revolution was what his regime proclaimed as it toppled the dying feudal autocracy.  No one asked the cost, and no one cared to measure it.  The slogan was to build ‘it’ at any cost.  It did not matter if that cost was the loss numbering millions of lives, or dashed hopes and opportunities.  The word ‘building’ seemed positive, but the actions were about destruction of humanity.

The 1984 famine came after a protracted war in different parts of the Ethiopian empire: war with Ogaden, war with Eritrea and Tigray, war with other oppressed nations, war within the establishment, and the red terror against opposition groups.  Mengistu’s atrocities did not end there.  The villagisation and the resettlement programs were projects that would be planned by devils.  And all Ethiopian regimes have been closer to one.  The villagisation program was a communist experiment in a terribly poor empire.  It made everyone equally destitute, and Mengistu learned the lessons long after M. Gorbachev of the then Soviet Union.  The poverty that visited upon the rural families by ruthless policies, the environmental damage that the malicious resettlement programs engendered, and the ruthless execution of war which led to famine were openly described by the western journalists.  They declared the place something nearer to hell on hearth.  For millions of people whose voices are crushed and repressed, the place has been a hell for nearly a century.

Now came the year 2000.  No one reported in 1973 and 1984 that the magnitude of the problem is as huge as it is today.  Over eight million people are threatened with famine today.  The world is now surprised why all this is happening in the lands where only a few years ago the regime’s officials were outspoken in saying their programs help rural communities (where more than 85% of the whole populations live), that food self-sufficiency was achieved.

The current Tigrean ethno-national regime is only nearly a decade old, but the blunders it committed so far have no proportions or precedents.  No one community or national group is at ease with the policies of TPLF/EPRDF regime.  Since its coming to power in 1991, all aspects of life are politicized.  It's ‘federal’ regional policies are a sham, as The Economist magazine has once noted.  Its democratic record is a shambles.  Its human rights record are, if anything, worse.  Its economic policies are full of contradictions; they are full of favoritism and open disregard of humane change and socio-political balance.  Political corruption is rife while the regime’s evaluation and transparency measures focus on political loyalty more than on anything else.

The regime has been going into wars with neighboring countries using all the pretexts it can manipulate.  At one time it fights ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ (e.g. Somalia), a crusader of the 20th century.  At another time, it becomes a peacemaker fighting lawlessness outside its jurisdiction (e.g. in Kenya and Somalia).  All along, since 1992, it caries out low level wars with organized groups that demand self-determination for their people.  Today, the people who live in the areas where this demand is the strongest as in Ogaden and Oromia regions are facing famine.

Only a few months ago massive fires consumed large forests, the plight of which was not properly addressed. Again the areas of this calamity are the southern areas such as Bale and Borana in Oromia; Qoreleh in Ogaden; Malagawondo and Meme in Sidama; and scores of areas in the west as in Benishangul.  The cause of the fires remains suspect but the reasons such as windy, long dry seasons, honey collection and land scramble by local populations is lame.  Students who demonstrated against the government’s handling of the fire crises faced hostile response.  Four students in Ambo and three students in Dambi Dollo regions of Oromia were killed.  Whatever caused the fire, the destruction of the forests will have huge environmental consequences not only for the areas involved but for the region as a whole.  In this regard, one would only appeal to international humanitarian and environmental groups to pursue the matter and pre-empt further destruction.

The problems do not stop at fires and famine.  The regime’s policies of inciting ethno-national conflicts has displaced tens of thousands among Gedeo and Guji Oromo communities.  The regime encourages artificial divisions within national communities along caste, religious and regional dimensions. In many rural areas, the forced sale of fertilizer to peasant farmers and the method of recouping the sales proceeds, the heavy tax exactions, and several forms of forced contributions to TPLF owned and controlled economic entities made people in the rural and urban areas exceedingly vulnerable to natural mishaps.  Problems were observed in Hadiya, in Gambella, and in Wolayta associated with the regime’s policies.

On top of all these, the war with Eritrea now in its third year is exacting massive burden on populations in Ethiopia.  First came the requirement to safeguard ‘territorial’ sovereignty and integrity of the empire.  This meant ‘Everything to the War Front’, a familiar tone from the Derg era. The incident in Badme is blown out of proportion causing the massacre of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, while the heavy fire in the south did force raise the eyebrows of the officials of the regime.  Next came the recruitment for war.  This author anticipated in July 1998, only a few months into the beginning of the TPLF war venture with Eritrea, the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the war.  Meetings were conducted in Berlin, Germany, and soon in Stockholm, Sweden, and nearly no one in the international community heeded the voices of the oppressed people then.  And now every one seems scrambling for what can be done to relieve the burden of destruction and death primarily imposed by a very bad government.  The same war is not only depleting the natural resources but all kinds of resources that may be available in the future.

To informed audience, it came to no surprise when a minister of Ethiopia accused foreigners for not responding soon for a disaster his regime has a big hand facilitating the processes that lead up to this scenario.  As if begging is a business of prudence and pride, it dictates which routes the aid should come and which should not.  It refuses the offer of port services from a warring neighbor for ‘moral ' reasons or for reasons only devils understand. 

The difference of the TPLF regime of Ethiopia from the past ones is that this one uses all the pretexts and precedents to pre-empt and trample alternatives.  The past rulers of the empire are too proud to tell the world that people under their, otherwise tragic, rule do starve in fact.  Menelik had a pretext to hide the great famine behind the war with European fascism.  Haile Selassie had to hide fascistic famine with the connivance of the western powers.  Mengsitu had a project to finish before accepting his policies were ruthless and contributed to famine.  Today’s rulers are the first to tell all is well and sooner than later admit that all is worse.  They cannot avoid today’s media exposure that contrasts with the deafening silence of the past.  For this, they admit the inevitable and declare bankrupt when everything is out of their handling.

Now the outside world faces dilemma, as does this author.  It is true that politics affects the economic and social conditions in any country.  It is true that the buck stops at the benches of officials who impose destructive policies and their sponsors.  But the humanitarian disaster does not give much time to spend on the luxury of disputing the rights and wrongs of the regime in power.  In the short term, the international community has no alternative other than looking for ways of helping the people whose saddening images appear on their TV screens, inevitably disturbing people’s conscience.  Such relief aid may help to save the dying now. But the real help is a commitment to humanitarian approach that helps people to help themselves.  That is an issue to be addressed today.  While relief work is as urgent as ever, the need to see long-term solution is by far much more beneficial to the people affected, to the region, and even to the world. 

*Dr. Seyoum Hameso is the managing editor of Sidama Concern and the author of several books.